Judeapedia
Ceasefire, Colonizer, & Compromise: C Is For…
January 25, 2024

Ceasefire, Colonizer, & Compromise: C Is For…

The Judeapedia: The A to Z’s of the current moment, from Antisemitism to Zionism. C is for Canaan to Crusades, with some controversial stops along the way. Sources & further reading inside.

This is part of a series on antisemitism, Israel, Zionism, and current events in 2023-2024 (5784).

The intent of this series is to educate, dispel antisemitism and bigotry, and combat propaganda that endangers both Jews AND Palestinians. The misinformation around Israel and Jews is vast and ancient, well-designed, and widespread, and contributes directly to perpetuating the conflict and elevating violence above a peace process.

Canaan

  • /Kənáʿan/ noun. The Jewish spiritual home since ancient times is the biblical land of Canaan.
  • The Torah tells the story of the Israelites leaving Egypt and conquering the land of Canaan, now modern Israel / Palestine. Some take this as evidence of modern Israel’s invalidity; “See, they were always colonizers.”
  • But archaeological findings suggest the Israelite culture largely overlapped with and derived from Canaanite culture.
  • It’’’s far more likely that the Torah is symbolic in nature, and an actual conquest did not take place; Israelites, and thus Jews, emerged from / merged with Canaanites, and now Jews and Palestinians survive as identities. All are indigenous to the land based on genetic and archeological evidence.

Read more:

Ceasefire

  • /ˈsēsˌfī(ə)r/ noun.
  • What the masses are calling for while chanting “Intifada”.
  • Most people seem to be calling for Israel to cease existing, not just to cease war, and aren’t calling for Hamas to surrender and release the hostages. All the focus and pressure is on Israel when the conflict is always a proxy war (see Iran) with other players in the region, including Qatar.

Ceastifada

  • A Ceastifada is what most people are actually calling for: Israel to cease fire and all of Israel’s neighbors to destroy it, along with half the world’s Jews. And “Globalize the Intifada” means just that: kill all the world’s Jews.
  • The same people most vocally calling for a ceasefire have in their ranks people insisting Israel has no right to defend itself. See Intifada, a word that in the last 30 years has come to include suicide bombings targeting civilians.

Read more:

China

  • China is one of the biggest human rights violators in the world—and one of the same countries ignored by activists.
  • You can condemn China as much as you condemn Israel, or like, try to condemn them at all. Where are the protests?
  • According to Human Rights Watch, 2 of the top 11 human rights news stories in 2023 were violations by Israel, including #1 and #4. For reference, Iran is listed last; China is not mentioned at all, and not all items on the list are negative; it includes 1 piece of good news (LGBT rights in Nepal) and a confirmation that Hamas committed war crimes.
  • The UN has a similar bias. The overwhelming majority of human rights resolutions target Israel: 14 total in 2001-2002, and only 5 targeting countries other than Israel including violations in China, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Turkey, Pakistan, Vietnam, Algeria, or 175 other countries.
  • And lastly, this matters not just for comparison: China, Iran, and Russia are an axis, and all supported Hamas after Oct. 7, with Iran providing financing. All 3 nations oppress their own people.

Read more:

Civil Rights

See BLM and Black Community. Jews were in the vanguard of Black, women’s, and queer movements, and Jews marched in Selma—and were murdered by the KKK alongside Black activists. We’ve been allies for decades, and it’s disappointing that BLM in particular chose antisemitism, thinking they’re “punching up” when they could be pairing up. Antisemitism is the building block of racism and white supremacy, the founding feature of it.

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Cognitive Dissonance / Confirmation Bias

Confirmation Bias works like an echo chamber; cognitive dissonance is the tension between two of your beliefs, or your beliefs and actions. Example: feminists are denying that mass rape occurred on October 7, despite their insistence to believe all women. They think denial, or outright vilifying rape and murder victims, is “punching up” and that Israelis in particular deserve it. They’re not seeing the reality of that day, both in video and in firsthand accounts, because of their confirmation bias, leaving those of us who saw it and its impact left haunted and shocked.

Read more:

Collective Liberation

  • Collective Liberation is a great idea in theory! “No one is free until all of us are free.” Except the left has wrapped freeing Palestine up in destroying Israel (see False Dichotomy) and tied Palestinian liberation to all other causes.
  • The result of this is that Jews everywhere are increasingly seen as a threat and obstruction to liberation; the oppressor vs. oppressed paradigm throws Jews back into “oppressor,” which is an ancient and deadly antisemitic trope.
  • Palestine having a free state has nothing to do with queer rights, in Palestine or anywhere else. It has nothing to do with race, and especially with racial politics and history in America (see Civil Rights. BLM. Projection.)

Read more:

Collective Punishment

  • Holding an entire group responsible for the actions of one or a few. This type of punishment is often a war crime, and if Israel is doing it, it should be investigated and punished.
  • The people calling the Gaza war (2023-2024) collective punishment of civilians, or revenge, also call it a genocide. Yet they refuse to call October 7 a genocide or collective punishment, and frequently say things like “Israel has no right to exist or defend itself.”
  • So which is it? Are unarmed civilians, including workers and tourists from other countries, valid targets for “resistance” or not?

Read more:

College / Campus

  • Colleges and Universities are hotbeds of young identity formation and protests. But as places of learning where minds should be expanding, something nefarious has happened in the West.
  • Since 9/11, rampant Islamophobia was met with a needed reversal. Lately though it’s difficult to criticize an Arab or Muslim without being called a racist (see Infantilizing). Youth who don’t remember 9/11 seem especially susceptible to misinformation, going so far as to praise Bin Laden in bizarre viral videos and now, to get in bed with Hamas by cheering Oct. 7 and the slaughter of not just Jews and Israelis, but any person who happened to be caught in Israel that day (Collective Punishment).
  • And that’s just on the student side; professors and administrators from Harvard on down are doing the same and then giving creepy testimony before congressional hearings, essentially denying exploding antisemitism is even a problem. It’s all Orwellian, and because of the narrative inversion that Jews are white oppressors, harassing and murdering us is OK; but even condemning a single Palestinian for mass rape and murder is somehow an aggression.
  • See: Revisionism. BLM. Qatar.

Further reading:

Colonizer / Colonization

  • One slur to come out of colleges is “Colonizer.” The idea that Israelis—and by extension, Jews everywhere—don’t belong, are thieves, and should be stripped of their land and ownership is an ancient and deadly attack.
  • “Israel is a settler-colonial state.” This is an ahistorical inversion of reality. Jews are from Judea, the ancient West Bank. There’s no expiration date for indigeneity, and Jews never left. Those who did leave were forced out and unable to return if they tried. A colony requires a home country; Israel IS the home country of Jews, and most of the Jews there are from the Middle East (and by Western standards, would be considered people of color / non-white). This bizarre inversion of history stems from Soviet-era propaganda and racism against Jews. See Ahistorical. Antisemitism. Erasure.

Sources and further reading:

Comments

  • Where facts and respect go to die. The comments section has notoriously been a cesspool since YouTube first allowed open, public, anonymous commenting. Neither Google nor Facebook anticipated that social media – and comment sections – would drive social movements and propaganda.
  • They’ve also done shockingly little to tamper misinformation, famously letting Trump and his ilk make up whatever alternative facts and history they liked, contributing to him winning in 2016 and leveraging his newfound power to empower alt-right and antisemitic groups.
  • The result is an anti-intellectual revolution. Everyone feels entitled to an opinion on everything, even complex geopolitical situations that no one’s been able to solve for 100 years. And an overwhelming number of bot accounts—from Russia, Iran, China, and more—make it seem like everyone agrees with you when you’re spouting propaganda from those countries.

Complex / Complicated

  • /ˈkämpləˌkādəd/ adj.
  • Yes. It is complicated.
  • Are people trying to oversimplify a conflict that experts haven’t solved for 100 years? Yeah, that means they’re lying.
  • A few things are at play here. The narrative that Palestinians have no choice or agency is false. Their leaders keep trying the same things over and over to rid the land of all Jews, failing, and then blaming the world.
  • This cartoon (The Nib), for example, one of many claiming things like “It’s too complicated to ever change it!” is unabashedly biased. If you try war and terror for 100 years and fail in your goal, you usually try another tack. It’s a perpetual victimhood and unreality; for all the harm done by Israel, the self-harm by the larger Arab world and culture, the Palestinian leadership, and Hamas are more to blame for the current quagmire. Even this cartoon states “wish we had political freedom,” of a people who’ve not yet seriously tried political means to liberate themselves.
  • Part of the playbook of claiming the Israel-Palestine issue “isn’t complicated” is to rewrite the history entirely.
  • Boom! All of a sudden, it does look simple! Here are some common examples:
  • “Jews took over the land from Europe”

Most Jews in Israel are from the Middle Eastern countries that expelled them, the 1920s – 60s (and even Yemen in 2000).

  • “Jews were a small minority there”

This is a symptom of centuries of colonialism. Jews were prevented from returning. When did our indigeneity expire?

  • “Jews started it / There was peace before 1948”

This one doesn’t even make sense combined with the last one. How did a small minority take over? Especially Holocaust survivors? The answer is complex (see notes).

  • “Palestine was divided / We want it back”

Even orgs like Decolonize Palestine openly admit there wasn’t a nation of Palestine. It was a British colonial unit.

So, it was decolonized… By the Jews.

  • Do you want Peace in the Middle East? Great. We can begin by agreeing on complexities, starting with agreeing on facts; the entire point of this series! Some keys to compromise include:
    • Jews and Palestinians share DNA and histories. This is a civil war. Expelling an entire group because of a civil war is ethnic cleansing, so if you’re accusing Israel of it, then the solution to it can’t also be ethnic cleansing.
  • Right of Return is complicated. Palestinians want right of return, which would in effect destroy the state of Israel through political/demographic means. Simultaneously, the notion of Jewish ROR isn’t even considered, including to the West Bank, which is the ancient Jewish biblical homeland where Jews were ethnically cleansed from 1948 onwards. To say nothing of Jewish ROR to the MENA countries that expelled them and took their homes and possessions. Why is this right only one-sided?
  • Until the 1948 War, Jews bought land legally, sold to them by Arabs (usually people outside of Palestine). How is it right to take that back as well?

Compromise

  • /ˈkämprəˌmīz/ noun. Anathema to so-called peace activists.
  • “We don’t want no two states, we want all of it”
  • “From the River to the Sea”
  • “Globalize the Intifada!”
  • “By any means necessary!”
    • Islam traditionally teaches that Jews are inferior, not to be trusted, and the day will come when we are all slaughtered. Empirically, the countries surrounding Israel are taught that Israel is evil, to be destroyed, and that to compromise on anything, say, borders or a peace deal, is an evil not to be allowed. Thus, the conflict has lasted 100 years.
    • When you bring up the issue of compromise, negotiating terms, or that Israel hasn’t started a single war, the usual retort is “Of course they (the Arab nations) invaded!” “Of course, they didn’t accept the partition/half the land. It’s their homeland!” Except it’s the Jewish homeland as well, and the Arab armies have lost every single war and still refuse to accept terms, aided by allies insisting they keep trying violence vs. diplomacy. Around and around we go.

Sources and further reading:

Conspiracy

/kənˈspirəsē/ noun. Jews are to blame for everything, and if you can convince enough people to blame the Jews, they turn a blind eye to what’s really going on. The scapegoating of Israel is no different, it’s just a modern propaganda war.

Some terms and history:

  • A cabal — a secret group with nefarious purposes—comes from the word Kabbalah. You name it, Jews have been blamed for it!:
  • Jews control the media/banks, US/world
  • Jews are murderous/untrustworthy/uniquely evil

George Soros. QAnon. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Anti-Jewish conspiracy theories make the world go around.

Antisemitism is the world’s oldest hatred. It permeates everything. These theories are a huge reason for the vitriol against Israel, which is accused of everything Jews are, and then some. So much of this stems from Blood Libel and Soviet-era propaganda, and so much of it is endangering Jews everywhere—and Palestinians, too.See also Antisemitism. Blood Libel.

Links:

Context

/ˈkäntekst/ noun. An excuse to harm Jews.

The inability to unequivocally condemn Hamas and Oct. 7 is wild.

Starting on that horrific day, “activists” and the internet began to insist we look at acts of mass rape and torture of unarmed civilians through the “context” of the occupation.

Let’s be crystal clear; what they mean is, the Jews deserved it. That’s what always happens. There have been countless thousands of pogroms of Jews across 2,600 years and we are always blamed for it, all the way up to the Holocaust.

There is no justifying mass violence by claiming civilians deserved it. No one is legitimately doing that in Gaza; we aren’t celebrating. The people citing “context” are also denying mass-rape occurred, downplaying that day, downplaying any role Islamic terror has in the history of the conflict, and claiming that Israel is a colony, period, to be destroyed. Make no mistake. They want more of what happened that day, and they celebrate it.

“Context” is a ruse, and their definition of “context” is an ahistorical lie to begin with. Oct. 7 didn’t Free Palestine.

Criticism

Yes, you can and should criticize Israel and governments in general. But when it veers into blatant antisemitism, you endanger Jews worldwide. The Context Mob is failing a basic test of decency and progress, and really harming their own movements, to boot.

No, criticism does NOT include:

  • “Israel shouldn’t exist” / “Jews are [insert trope or insult here]”
  • Saying “Zionists” when you actually mean Jews (80-90% of Jews are Zionists, and people are targeting Jews)
  • Ripping down posters of hostages
  • Chanting things like “Globalize the intifada”
  • Reductionism / Revisionism / Fake History / Lies
  • Treating Jews and Israel unlike anyone else, including:
    • Demanding Israel not defend itself
    • Making Israel / Jews out to be uniquely evil
    • Demanding only Israel cease-fire, not Hamas etc.
    • Targeting Jews in the diaspora for protests and harassment and violence / Holding Jews accountable for Israel’s government and actions

Valid criticism and activism aren’t violent, hostile, or revisionist. Period.

Crusades

  • ​​/kro͞oˈsād/ noun. A religious war, and historically,
  • conquest of Israel and Jerusalem.
  • During its long history, Jerusalem has been attacked 52 times, captured and recaptured 44 times, besieged 23 times, and destroyed twice. The Christian Crusades were 2 campaigns, 1095 to 1291, to recapture the Holy Land from the Muslims.
  • Along the way, bored crusaders wiped out Jews in Europe in the name of religion and with the funding and blessing of the Pope. Upon arrival in Jerusalem, they killed every man, woman, and child, with priests writing that the blood was up to their ankles.
  • Today Jerusalem faces a modern-day crusade: The attempt to retake it and all of Israel for the Arab people, and drive all Jews from the land, the stated goal of the Pan-Arab project. In the case of Hamas and others: their goal is the destruction of all Jews.

For more:

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